Dempsey: VA scandal demands accountability

5/25/14 11:08 AM EDT

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says everyone involved in the Veterans Affairs scandal must take responsibility and be held accountable.

In a taped interview marking Memorial Day with ABC's Martha Raddatz at Arlington National Cemetery, Gen. Martin Dempsey said on "This Week" the situation demands action from those in charge.

"It is outrageous, if the allegations actually are documented and proven — and I suspect some of them will be," Dempsey said. "They've got to be held accountable."

Dempsey said that VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has made it clear that those responsible will have to answer for what has happened.

"At some point, the chief executive, the chairman, whoever it is, has to take responsibility for the entire organization and its performance," Dempsey said when asked if Shinseki, a retired four-star Army general, should bear some of the blame.

In the interview, Dempsey also cited the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916" to Raddatz when discussing what the national memorial site means to him.

"This is a place of terrible beauty, isn't it?" Dempsey said, paraphrasing the line "All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born."

"History will repeat itself on the issue of conflict. The issues that are beginning to be resolved are not ending," he said. "We're going to have a challenge of extremism in the unsettled and ungoverned spaces that run from Afghanistan to Nigeria for a very long time."